Selective Memory

Chris Wubbena - Jackson, Missouri
2002Voted Best of Show!

Artist's StatementThe concepts and forms that make up my artwork generate from an interest in melding physical and cultural history into compositions that exhume, analyze and challenge issues from yesterday and today. Through an assortment of media I create artwork that compiles and preserves information into layered, stacked, and eroded forms. The finished product most often references the link between geology, history, and everyday life, such as social stratification, political fissures, or historical sedimentation and erosion. The sculpture, titled Selective Memory, is an autobiographical mining of the past, present and future, as memory fades and earth erodes.

In the end, the artwork I create is an amalgamation of various landmarks and artifacts. A landmark is more than a simple object or place; it is a reminder of an emotion, experience, or discovery. An artifact is a clue into secrets, secrets that have resisted the affects of time, to tell old underlying stories. The landmarks and artifacts presented in my work, through material, form, and content, investigate our shared contemporary existence as it sits teetering atop a world of accumulated beliefs, traditions and misconceptions.

Selective Memory exists as a contemporary artifact and brief fragment of personal growth. The metaphoric use of geology is employed for investigation into the layers of sediment and sentiment that make up a personal life story of history, memory and meaning. Through the constructive process of metal fabrication and the subtractive process of acid etching, Selective Memory unifies sculptural and pictorial languages into an autobiographical account of the past, present and future.

Artist's BioChris Wubbena holds a BFA from the University of Northern Iowa, an MFA with an emphasis in Sculpture from San Francisco State University and is currently a professional sculptor and Associate Professor of Art at Southeast Missouri State University. His work has been exhibited throughout the United States, in such exhibitions as “Art in Place” in Charlottesville, VA. “SculptureWalk” in Sioux Falls, SD, “The 9th Sculpture in the Park Exhibition” in Indianapolis IN and “A Southern Perspective on Prints: 2005 –New Orleans Triennial” in New Orleans Museum of Art. Chris has also completed a number of outdoor commissioned projects, such as: “Landmarks”, commissioned by Butler County Iowa and “Forward”, commissioned by Mississippi Power Company in Gulfport Mississippi to commemorate the work done by the Mississippi Power employees during and after the events surrounding Hurricane Katrina. In addition, Chris has been awarded various grants for the completion of larger indoor installation projects, including a Mississippi Arts Commission Visual Arts Fellowship with funding from the National Endowment for the Arts for the “De-Minimis Series”, and most recently a Grants and Research Funding Committee Grant from Southeast Missouri State University to complete a project titled “Speaking While Listening”, which is an expression, through sculptural installation, of the Viet Nam/American War and its contemporary relevance. “Speaking While Listening” has been exhibited at Southeast Missouri State University in Cape Girardeau, MO, Virginia Tech in Blacksburg, VA, Southern Illinois University in Carbondale, IL and Wartburg College in Waverly, IA.